Some of the important upgrades and new features in Cocoa Touch are:

1. Drag and drop API

We can pick up items, and drag it around, and we can tap to add additional items. All of it while the system is fully responsive and active, even allowing us to drag data between applications. What’s even better is that Apple would be giving about four sessions to the developers to brief them about a few key components of this API. For using it, you only have to create a UI drag interaction which is basically a new subclass of UI interaction and attach it to the view where you need this functionality.

Similar to Gesture Recognizer, a UI interaction needs a delegate to be set on it, attached to a view, and the system takes care of everything else. Pretty easy, right? Thank Apple. The UIDragInteractionDelegate protocol gives the developers a lot of opportunities to customize the drags. After providing the data for the item to be dragged, the developers can customize lift animation and preview.

After drag is defined, we define drop. Drop has to be defined to the super view instead of individual views. The UIDropInteractionDelegate protocol gives you a whole new set of opportunities to be creative. It allows you to update UI as the drag moves, and to receive data on drop, and also to customize drop animation. Additionally, it has built-in support for TableView, CollectionView, TextView, TextField, WebView and many other existing features. It can be easily integrated with UIPasteConfiguration.

2. File Management

The latest update allows for easier access to not only locally accessible documents but also the ones on the cloud. It uses a class called the UIDocumentBrowserViewController which handles this API. It is highly customizable, and it can coordinate file access using NSFile Coordinator as well as UIDocument.

3. UI Refinements

We see a lot of UI refinements in the latest Cocoa Touch, the most visible being a larger title. But wouldn’t that give lesser space for content? Apple took care of that too. The search bar collapses, followed by the title which now shifts to a smaller navigation bar with smaller text size so that maximum space is available for content. Pull to refresh feature is automatically included in the view. UI ScrollView now comes with a lot more features to have the perfect UI and response. It automatically takes care of much of the functionalities you had to define previously. UI TableViews now have a newly unified swipe delete feature just like the one you’ve used in the mail app, as well as a lot of other features which make the UI more appealing and interactive.

4. New APIs for Swift and Foundation

We can now archive swift native types. Foundation has also added support for archiving to JSON and property lists. Another great addition is the new KeyPath type with literal syntax, and getters and setters, instead of hard coding strings. A new block based KVO makes your code shorter and more optimized, yay! We can also save the edges from system responses so that we have an uninterrupted experience while using the apps. The interaction between AutoLayout and ScrollViews has also been improved. Dynamic Type has also seen some improvements ensuring a better overall experience for the users.

5. Asset Catalogs

One of the best new features is that when the system detects a username and password, the candidate bar shows a key icon. Upon clicking the key icon, we get a list of all saved usernames and passwords which allow us to choose the username and password we want without typing it all out. Asset Catalogs now come with the feature to make named colors. Asset Catalogs would now have wide gamut color support, wide gamut colors for icons, as well as the feature of app thinning for icons. It also comes with PDF-backed images. There is support for variable screen refresh rates too.

We hope this information is useful to you. Let us know what you think about it in the comments section below. Don’t forget to share it if you felt someone you know could benefit from this knowledge.

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1. Amazon Prime Video would be available in tvOS. So you can watch your favorite Amazon Prime Video shows seamlessly on your Apple TVs.
2. WatchOs 4 has been released smarter than ever with many faces for you to play around with. Every app has been tailored to provide you a better experience.
3. MacOS High Sierra has been released with features such as AutoPlay Blocking, and Intelligent Tracking Prevention in Safari, as well as a multitude of important tweaks in many of the applications you use daily. Apple File System would be the new default file system for High Sierra. MetalVR would also be available for it.
4. iMac is faster than ever with Intel Kaby Lake processors running at a frequency of upto 4.2 GHz with twice the memory support it previously did.
5. MacBook also got a performance upgrade and is now running at a frequency of up to 1.3 GHz on Core i7, with up to 50 percent faster SSD, and up to twice the memory support it previously did. Weighing just about two pounds and measuring 13.1mm thin, MacBook is now the thinnest and lightest notebook for on-the-go computing.
6. MacBook Pro saw a similar upgrade with the 13-inch variant clocking at up to 3.5 GHz  on Core i7, and the 13-inch variant clocking at up to 3.1 GHz on the same processor.
7. MacBook Air now comes with a 1.8  GHz processor
8. iOS 11 has rolled out with better messaging, payment, an improved Siri(it even has a translation feature!!!), camera, photos app, and an all new control center having everything in a single page for better accessibility.
9. The new iPad Pro is bigger and better. With 120 Hz screen refresh rate and loads of other features, it the obvious choice for all customers.
10. HomePod has been released which is here to “reinvent home music“. It is just under 7 inches tall, covered in a seamless 3D mesh fabric with incredible acoustic properties. Having 7 tweeters at the bottom, each tweeter having its own driver, and a 4 inch woofer this little device is really reinventing home music.

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ARKit is a new framework developed by Apple which allows developers to easily create unsurpassable augmented reality experiences for iPhones and iPads working on iOS 11. With ARKit, developers can create apps which allow the iPhones and iPads to analyze the vision of the camera thus finding horizontal planes like floors and tabletops. It also uses the camera sensors to gauge the total amount of light in a scene. You must be wondering how that would help. We would be explaining it further in this post.

ARKit allows you to put virtual objects on the flat surfaces around you. But isn’t that something that every Augmented Reality development kit provides? They do. But here’s the catch. None of them gives you such a great quality of display without compromising on the performance like ARKit does. As they displayed live in WWDC 2017, you can add multiple objects on the surface in front of you. These objects include even light sources which provide proper lighting to the virtual objects. The experience they provide is nothing short of reality, with shadows so synchronized with the virtual light sources that would blow your mind away. ARKit runs on Apple A9 and A10 processors. These processors deliver enhanced performance that enables faster scene understanding and rendering, thus letting you build detailed compelling virtual content over real-world scenes. For development purposes, you can use the optimizations for ARKit in Metal, SceneKit, and third-party tools like Unity and Unreal Engine.

ARKit uses Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) to precisely track the scene in front of it. VIO fuses camera sensor data with CoreMotion data. These inputs help the device in sensing how it moves anywhere with quite a high degree of accuracy, and, to much relief without any additional hassle of recalibration.

BrainMobi is one the top AR app development companies in India. We have a team of the best AR app developers who are innovative and flexible. Allow us to prove why we are one of the best AR app development companies in India as we convert your idea into the product you want it to be. Contact Us or send us a mail on sales@brainmobi.com

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